Sometimes (like today) I see that an answer of mine that had been accepted is no longer the accepted answer. Thing is, I have absolutely no idea which one and I'd really like to see which one to satisfy my curiosity. Please add that to recent history or something.

I notice too. I'm most curious because we're missing out on things to learn (apparently, there have been better answers, and it's only fair that we can learn from them too, even if we didn't ask the question initially?
–
seheSep 18 '11 at 19:37

4 Answers
4

I asked for this a while on UserVoice - I'd be very much in favour of this. It's weird to see your rep drop by 15 and have no idea why. It also means there's an answer with more information in than mine, which means I may be able to learn something from it :)

@thefourtheye it's working properly - unaccept/reaccept or the reverse on the same day are hidden intentionally. We have many, many instances of people voting/unvoting in a loop and don't want to show that spam on the rep history list.
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Nick Craver♦Nov 13 '13 at 11:12

It never happened to me that people accepting and unaccepting on different days. Lets see if I get notifications for it when it happens to me. Thanks :)
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thefourtheyeNov 13 '13 at 11:16

I've seen this happen to me a few times where the OP unaccepted my answer and wrote his/her own very specific answer and accepted that. Perhaps this happened because my answers tend to generalize the problem, sometimes abstracting the examples, reducing the snippet, etc. This is my way of looking at the "bigger picture" and try to write an answer that is most useful to everyone, instead of OP's specific problem, but like I said this sometimes backfires with unacceptance (or no acceptance to begin with).

I've also seen question askers that reviewed all the answers received, and compiled it into one super-duper awesome answer and accepted that. I actually don't mind losing acceptances this way, because I believe we want to encourage this behavior from ANYONE. Even better if we get the original question asker to do this, I think.

I've also been tempted to do this with my own questions (i.e. answering my own question with super-duper compilation of everyone's), but I don't think I've ever unaccepted an answer because I posted my own, for fear of repercussions etc. I usually still post my answer anyway, because I think we want the content.

If my answer ever gets more votes than the answer I've previously accepted, then I may consider accepting my own. This hasn't really happened yet.

As this is apparently somewhere between difficult and unfeasible, maybe we can change people's ethos so that the emphasis is on the community to let people know why their answer is no longer worthy of being accepted.

Maybe de-selecting an accepted answer and not posting a comment to the user who provided the answer could carry a rep penalty itself if the answer has been accepted for a certain length of time. Or at least a prompt to suggest that a comment would be courteous.